Geoff Russ: Canada's weak classical liberal foundations
Laurier and the others who lost the 'Battle of Confederation'.
Classical liberals are some odd ducks in Canada.
That’s all very well. They are allowed to exist. They truly have some very good ideas regarding urbanism and internal trade, and maybe even free trade. It is their misfortune that their ideology has exerted so little influence over the course of Canadian history, especially in politics.
Many self-described conservatives who call themselves classical liberals often belabour the claim that Canada has liberal foundations from which the country has strayed and which it has betrayed. So the argument goes: much of what went wrong with Canada can be attributed to forgetting these principles of Confederation.
What if these liberals (lower-case) are simply heirs to an at-best modest tradition in this country? What if Canada’s political foundations, far from being a sort of lost paradise of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden, instead amounted to an embrace of executive power and centralisation that had to be eroded through generations of political battles?
Geoff Russ: The 'nation of values' is a tyranny
Nations will devise any number of values and ideas, both good and bad. But the nation is always older.
To be sure, Canada inherited a liberal constitutional apparatus from Britain. It included an elected Parliament, responsible government, et cetera.
But is that what liberals on the centre-right tend to wring their hands about? Not particularly.
Instead, they mostly have their eyes fixed on the economy and the ways to liberalise it, as befits their name, while cutting the size and spending of government and reducing federal power for the benefit of the provinces. However, old-fashioned liberalism is about far more than politicised accounting.
One thing that conservatives cannot emphasise enough is that it was their faction that won the ‘Battle of Confederation’, in the words of Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the right that led the process of Confederation and proceeded to dominate the Dominion’s politics from 1867 until 1896, with the exception of an uneventful five-year interlude between 1873 and 1878.
George Brown, the leading Liberal of Confederation, privately referred to the British North America Act as ‘dreadfully Tory’ and placed great hopes in the ability of Parliament to help amend it. To achieve this goal, Brown even helped establish the Liberal Party of Canada in opposition to Macdonald.